Comedy Fans Are Horrified by the Prospect of Having to Defend Jimmy Fallon
Life in 2025 is already hard, but it’s going to get a whole lot harder if we’re forced to defend the guy who turned The Tonight Show into a glorified commercial for $270 pajamas and cartoon crypto nonsense.
As most of us are already aware, urine-soaked ABC executives just suspended Jimmy Kimmel “indefinitely” after his comments about Charlie Kirk’s killer elicited threats from the head of the FCC. This news comes just months after a merger-hungry Paramount canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, allegedly for financial reasons, but come on.
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Not long after the announcement of Kimmel’s suspension was made, Donald Trump took to Truth Social, which is like Twitter but with more ads for pillows and boner pills, to urge NBC to cancel Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He called their hosts “total losers” whose “ratings are also horrible.”
Now, a number of comedy fans seem to be very worried about the future — not because these shows might be canceled, but because they may soon be put in the unfortunate position of having to defend Jimmy Fallon.
Standing up to authoritarianism is clearly a no-brainer for a lot of people, but in this case, that will also mean going to bat for the guy who once performed a song about COVID that was somehow worse than COVID.
And while fascism is obviously horrible, well, so is Jimmy Fallon’s Christmas album:
That being said, if there’s any late-night host who’s likely willing to capitulate to the current administration’s demands, it’s Fallon, who recently attempted to cozy up to America’s right by having Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld on the show. And then there was Fallon’s hair-tussling stunt, which served to humanize Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election (Fallon later claimed that he meant to “minimize” him).
It’s especially annoying to have to defend Fallon, but it’s also frustrating that the battle between government censorship and comedy involves the Win Ben Stein’s Money guy. And Colbert’s liberal, Nerf-edged jokes about Trump weren’t really noteworthy — until his show was canceled and he was celebrated as if he were a political hero.
But again, these events have set a chilling precedent for the future of the country. So we may have to defend Fallon, but we’ll do it in the same dead-eyed, soulless manner that he conducts most interviews now.
